emergency transporter armbands

Does anyone know why the emergency transporter armbands that was seen more than a few times on TNG...well...at least twice...couldn't have been used to get both Picard and Data back to the Enterprise-E before Shinzon's ship exploded? Or is this just another plot hole much like Picard going back to Veridian 3 to fight Soran again, instead of getting him in 10-forward?

The transporter band things enhanced a lock... if you enhance the transporter lock on a broken transporter, it's still broken. Apparently the emergency beam out tag thing just is a one time hand wave thing. Though it still doesn't explain why Data and Picard couldn't have hugged and beamed over... tons of examples of the transporter just grabbing everything in a cylinder shaped area be it air, liquid or solid.

Does anyone know why the emergency transporter armbands that was seen more than a few times on TNG...well...at least twice...couldn't have been used to get both Picard and Data back to the Enterprise-E before Shinzon's ship exploded?

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They probably could. But I believe the expectation was that nobody would be recovered. There was no particular reason to plan for recovery when Picard expected to die trying to stop Shinzon.

Data didn't jump from ship to ship in the hopes of rescuing Picard, either, but in the hopes of helping Picard fight back a shipful of enemy warriors long enough to blow up the doomsday machine. It was just a convenient coincidence that Data had this miniaturized version of the armband hidden inside his arm at the time, courtesy of an earlier event where transporter recovery was planned but the armbands would not have been covert enough. It wasn't Data's plan to deliver the transporter aid; it was just something he realized he could do once it turned out that there existed an unexpected way to attain mission goals without requiring Picard to sacrifice his life in the process.

If other E-E crew members had possessed the ability to jump across vacuum, they would have joined the fray, too. If others had been able to transport from E-E to Scimitar, they would have. But not with the aim of saving Picard's life - instead, the aim would have been to stop the horrors the enemy was planning, and everybody would have accepted that there would be no return. For Picard, there was a return solely because the pair of heroes was successful in eliminating immediate resistance without casualties, and there thus was a crew member to spare for the necessary suicide phaser shot at the thalaron device.

it still doesn't explain why Data and Picard couldn't have hugged and beamed over

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The above interpretation does. One person absolutely has to die: the only way to destroy the evil apparatus is to fire a phaser at it, and all sorts of explosives and timer systems are out of the question for technical reason X (chiefly, lack of time). Data just provides Picard with the manpower reserves needed for Picard's safe return.

The interpretation also allows the tiny gadget to be a "realistic" pattern enhancer or beacon rather than an "unrealistic" self-contained transporter. The malfunctions after Picard's departure prevent all beaming, so no reinforcements for the skipper... LaForge's little people then perhaps partially repair the system, but transporting without enhancers inside the Bassen Rift is still lethal. And it's too late to send over reinforcements to Picard anyway.

On the other hand, there simply isn't time (or motivation) for Picard to originally grab an enhancer of the armband type, or to go fetch some explosives from armory, before beaming over. This is also why Picard, rather than Worf, beams over: the likely outcome of the mission in any case is that they all die, the odds of success for the one-man invasion are so ridiculously low overall that Worf wouldn't represent a significant improvement over Picard, and Picard is the one with the ultimate responsibility.

But the above bullshitting explanation allows the miniature thing to be nothing more than the armbands.

The movie dialogue is blessedly ambiguous, after all. All we learn is that the thing is called the "emergency transport unit"; nobody gives it any specs or limitations or indeed any description of what it actually does.

Yup, armbands are NOT transporters, they are personal signal enhancers. We have seen other types of enhancers also, like the cylinders Barclay used in 'Ship in a bottle' .

I hated the mini self-contained transporter used in Nemisis, it was just to much of a Magical tech devices.

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I try to rationalize the wearable transporter has having a dedicated, self-contained transporter on the ship somewhere. Otherwise it's ridiculous and stupid. Transporters are huge devices that take up two decks and would requite utterly ENORMOUS levels of power to operate. Even stupider with the device in NEM is that it could transport itself! How the fuck does that work?!

The armbands we see in the series are simply there to give a stronger, sure-thing, signal lock. They're not self-contained transporters. They're wearable versions of those three polls we'd see them set-up from time to time.

The pin in NEM? Dedicated transporter on the ship that's not otherwise accessible. (But probably could with time to get to it, time the crew didn't have.)

Transporters are huge devices that take up two decks and would requite utterly ENORMOUS levels of power to operate.

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The former is a slight exaggeration, as we have seen "miniature" versions already - they fit aboard shuttles and might be no larger than an air conditioner.

The latter sounds false, as we have seen transporters operated when power is very limited, and once apparently activated with a hand phaser battery when other power was shut off ("The Hunted"). Granted, a device less than a tenth the size of a supposed hand phaser battery might still be a bit implausible for containing the power for even a single transport, and never mind there would be space for nothing else in there!

The transporter band things enhanced a lock... if you enhance the transporter lock on a broken transporter, it's still broken. Apparently the emergency beam out tag thing just is a one time hand wave thing. Though it still doesn't explain why Data and Picard couldn't have hugged and beamed over... tons of examples of the transporter just grabbing everything in a cylinder shaped area be it air, liquid or solid.

I try to rationalize the wearable transporter has having a dedicated, self-contained transporter on the ship somewhere. Otherwise it's ridiculous and stupid. Transporters are huge devices that take up two decks and would requite utterly ENORMOUS levels of power to operate. Even stupider with the device in NEM is that it could transport itself! How the fuck does that work?!

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The pin probably left a few of it's guts on Shinzon's ship, hence it being one use only.

As for size, we've seen transporters on shuttlecraft before and we've seen replicators (which I assume use some similar technologies) that fit into small slots on walls. The whole point of the Nemesis dohicky was that the technology was moving forward, getting smaller. Not long ago computers took up entire rooms, but now I'm typing this on my tiny phone.

Picard should have gone back and killed Sorans grandfather before he was born and... well, you know where this is going...

As for transporting off the Simitar, I think not as their shields were still up when Picard beamed through the shields and back to the Enterprise... ????Wait a minute!!!! another plot hole.... AAAAAARRRGGHH this sounds like fiction!!! not ordinary fiction!!!! SCIENCE FICTION!!!!

I try to rationalize the wearable transporter has having a dedicated, self-contained transporter on the ship somewhere. Otherwise it's ridiculous and stupid. Transporters are huge devices that take up two decks and would requite utterly ENORMOUS levels of power to operate. Even stupider with the device in NEM is that it could transport itself! How the fuck does that work?!

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The pin probably left a few of it's guts on Shinzon's ship, hence it being one use only.

As for size, we've seen transporters on shuttlecraft before and we've seen replicators (which I assume use some similar technologies) that fit into small slots on walls. The whole point of the Nemesis dohicky was that the technology was moving forward, getting smaller. Not long ago computers took up entire rooms, but now I'm typing this on my tiny phone.

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All a lot different than a transporter being made the size of a pin! Sorry, it's a piece of "Treknology" I'm not willing to accept.

The device Data had could be nothing other than a portable entirely self-contained transporter unit, and not just mearly a remote control because the transporters on Enterprise were offline. That's why he jumped over in the first place.

Still a stupid device. The only reason this device existed in this movie is because 1) Data had to die, and 2) they had already used the "I can only bring you back one at a time" method of leaving someone behind in the franchise.

The "it must be a whole transporter because the ship had none" argument sounds hollow because the ship necessarily had dozens if not hundreds of transporters. How plausible would it be for all of them to go up in smoke?

We know that the ship's main transporters have "bottlenecks": way back in "Enemy Within", it was possible to hit a key set of cables to disable the entire system. But we also know that TNG era ships are likely to have independent transporter units lying about, aboard the auxiliary craft, in science labs and workshops, possibly under the bed of a kid who wants to do exciting experiments in secret from his mommy. It would stand to reason that one of those in combination with a targeting aid would do the same job as a main transporter without a targeting aid, at least after LaForge tinkered with it for a while.

One person doesn't have to die. Both Romulan and Federation phasers were shown in TNG to have the ability to be placed on overload where they blow themselves up after about 30 seconds.

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But if we want a plot where one person does have to die, it's not difficult to claim that an exploding phaser would be insufficient for the job, and only an actual beam, specifically modulated or whatnot, would ensure the destruction of the thalaron device.

The very fact that the thalaron device was so exposed to the environment might be taken to indicate that it was in fact heavily shielded and impossible to hurt with things like ricochets or nearby explosions. An exploding phaser might take out the command center and spew debris everywhere - leaving the forcefield-protected thalaron matrix standing free and unhurt in the middle of the cavity created!

If the overload isn't good enough, I'll point you to "The Mind's Eye" where they had the weapon set on autofire. If a cell phone half the size of that phaser today is almost as good as a computer, I think in a couple hundred years a phaser would have a delay setting to auto fire.

Though really the concept that death core ican only be damaged by phaser fire somehow and not explosions is a cop out at best. The thing was so unstable that a hand weapon damaging it caused the whole ship to explode. So the 24th century equivalent to a hand grenade which has far more destructive yield(see the episode where Ro and Geordi become ghosts, forgot the name off hand) than a plain phaser bast, should do the job.

There's really no getting around it. The way they killed off Data was clumsy and just made the characters look dumb.

One thing we might draw parallels with would be "A Matter of Honor". The emergency signaling device there was essentially doing the job of a commbadge: calling for instant beam-up. It just did that silently.

With a commbadge, one can specify "three to beam up", and somehow O'Brien then manages to beam up the exact right three out of a crowd. Perhaps there's something more to the commbadge (which Riker also had in "AMoH") than meets the eye, then?

And perhaps the doodad from "AMoH" and the somewhat smaller doodad from ST:NEM are one and the same thing, lacking that mysterious something, and therefore only allowing one person without luggage to be sent over, hugging or no hugging?

In any case, regardless of the clumsiness or silliness of the setup, we shouldn't think in terms of "how to rescue Picard", because it's quite possible that rescue was never a serious consideration in that situation. Rescue was just a happy coincidence in the successful completion of the primary mission.